It is shown that the equations governing linearized gravitational (or electromagnetic) perturbations of the near-horizon geometry of any known extreme vacuum black hole (allowing for a cosmological constant) can be Kaluza-Klein reduced to give the equation of motion of a charged scalar field in ${\mathrm{AdS}}_2$ with an electric field. One can define an effective Breitenlöhner-Freedman bound for such a field. We conjecture that if a perturbation preserves certain symmetries then a violation of this bound should imply an instability of the full black hole solution. Evidence in favor of this conjecture is provided by the extreme Kerr solution and extreme cohomogeneity-1 Myers-Perry solution. In the latter case, we predict an instability in seven or more dimensions and, in five dimensions, we present results for operator conformal weights assuming the existence of a conformal field theory dual. We sketch a proof of our conjecture for scalar field perturbations.

• Received 31 January 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.83.104044